Well, opq, I don't know what to say... if you feel Kenny was overly deceptive, malevolent, and had a bad attitude, then I can understand on the basis of your interpretation... it is always difficult to determine someone's tone or attitude via e-mail, though. But if what you say about reply #2 is correct, do you think most customers would have wanted to hear that it is corporate policy that HGST is only providing it to US customers? They would say "why only US? That isn't fair." You can't win either way.

I personally think it is more a case of either (1) a lack of sharing or politics between divisions, or (2) that AP was not authorized to distribute that special firmware for the reasons I detailed above.

Anyways, I am glad that everything worked out for you in the end. It is not uncommon for support techs to be uninformed or have support policies that are fairly restrictive. I have experienced this so often that I expect support to be useless and am overjoyed when they are helpful, knowledgeable, and fast.

No problem at all. Thanks for providing your opinion; I suppose I did react a bit over the top, but hey! I agree, e-mail usually leads to deceptions because of the lack of tone, sarcasm etc,.

To be honest I would have actually preferred the honest "it's only available for North American distribution ATM" reply. At least it shows some honesty; I've lived over here for a while now since moving away from NA, and I've gotten used to products, services and other tidbits not being shipped/serviced to the AP region.

No problem at all. Thanks for providing your opinion; I suppose I did react a bit over the top, but hey! I agree, e-mail usually leads to deceptions because of the lack of tone, sarcasm etc,.

One thing I'll add to all this is that you have to consider the fact that English is probably a second (or third, fourth, ...) language for Kenny Lim. I work with colleauges from outside North America every day and have experienced this on a regular basis. It's often difficult for those that aren't fluent in English to put meaningful sentences together in the first place, yet alone convey the tone of the message they were actually intending.

We do appreciate if you can provides further correspondences from the US division to you as we do not wish to be judged by you for not being able to assist you in providing the firmware.

With my previous point in mind, I struggle to see any criticism in this quote from Kenny. He's simply asking if you'd be kind enough to help him to help you (and others).

OK, enough I'll step down from my soapbox now...

My 2 160GB SATA 7k250s should arrive tomorrow. Interested to see if they'll have the new f/w. Just bought a 250 GB on Friday and it's meowing like mad.

Hey I bought a SATA 160gb hitachi a while ago and now it has failed. I don't have that weird meowing noise you guys are referring to but the drive died after installing an adobe postscript driver??? I have 3 partitions on it and all 3 have damaged sectors. Its taking me hours using easyrecovery to get the files off the damned thing. Just recently after a few restarts the SMART says something is bad or something...

After i rip the data off i'm going to use the DFT thingy mabob to try and fix it with low level format etc... My question is, will speed be never be that same? and will the SMART error go away?

I had a 60gb maxtor give me a SMART error before and it did a low level format and it works to this day but the SMART error never went away even after the drive was recertified by the maxtor diag prog whatever it was.

In any case Hitachi still seems to have IBM's crappy tech still in their harddrives. Maybe 2nd gen will be better?

Also do you guys buy that $7.50 box on the hitachi website to ship the harddrive in to RMA?

I emailed Hitachi Global Storage about the availability of an updated "quiet" firmware for my PATA 7K250. Here is their response. I have just installed it on my 4-drive 3ware RAID5 Fedora Core 2 server, and all four drives are happy with the new firmware. I'll post later about what I hear (if anything) with this new firmware.

Unless you have the exact drives mentioned below, I'd suggest emailing them yourselves to see what they say. I accept no liability for any damage this causes to your system.

If you do try it, please posts your findings in this thread. If you get a SATA version of the firmware from Hitachi, please also post that to this thread.

- Chris

Chris,

The attached file is a firmware update for your Parallel ATA 7K250 driveand is specifically designed to help reduce the noises generated when theidle time sweep functions are triggered in the drive. This update will notrun on any other drive than those for which the firmware is intended. Inorder to successfully execute this update, you need to meet the followingrequirements:

1) A system with a floppy disk drive.2) A Hitachi GST hard drive with one of the following model numbers: -HDS722540VLAT20 -HDS722580VLAT20 -HDS722512VLAT20 -HDS722512VLAT80 -HDS722516VLAT20 -HDS722516VLAT803) A non-RAID ATA controller.

****Note: If your drive was originally sold to a system manufacturer forintegration into their systems, this update utility may not work. Thisupdate utility is designed to run only on drives sold in the distributionand retail markets. Updates for drives originally sold in pre-builtsystems should be obtained from the system manufacturer.

Once you have met the above requirements, you will need to make a bootablefloppy that contains the Drive Fitness Test Firmware Upgrade Utility. Todo this, please follow these instructions:

1) Detach the attachment from this email to a temporary directory on yoursystem (i.e. your Windows Desktop).2) The file we have sent you is in ZIP format, as there are many firewalland anti-virus programs that may not allow EXE files to be sent directly.You will need to extract the EXE file using an extraction program such asWinZip or WinRAR.3) Double-click the extracted executable file (.exe) to launch the InstallShield Wizard.4) Follow the on-screen instructions, inserting a blank floppy disk whenprompted.

****Warning: Before initiating the update process, be sure you back upyour data to a separate medium (CD, DVD, different Hard Drive, etc...) andverify the backup was successful. If the firmware update is notsuccessful, the data on the drive being updated will be lost.

Insert the disk into the floppy drive and boot the system. If the driveyou wish to update is capable of being updated, you will get a messageasking if you want to update the firmware on the drive. If you choose toUpdate, the process will begin. This may take several minutes to complete.

It is very important NOT to disturb this process until it has completedsuccessfully. Should the process be prematurely terminated, the drive maybe rendered inoperable and the data unrecoverable.

Once the update has been completed, the system bus will be rescanned. Ifthe update was successful and no other drives were detected that may needthe update, you will receive a message indicating so and you will beprompted to exit.

If you encounter any problems during or immediately following the update,please contact technical support at 888.426.5214. We can be reached duringthe hours of 8am to 8pm, Monday through Friday. You can also email us atsupport2_usa@hitachigst.com

I just update 4 of my 7K250 HDDs. It looks like the meow sound is disappeared.But I wonder whether it has the side-effect for the reliability issue. Can we switch back to the stock firmware (just in case...) ?

I emailed Hitachi Global Storage about the availability of an updated "quiet" firmware for my PATA 7K250. Here is their response. I have just installed it on my 4-drive 3ware RAID5 Fedora Core 2 server, and all four drives are happy with the new firmware. I'll post later about what I hear (if anything) with this new firmware.

Unless you have the exact drives mentioned below, I'd suggest emailing them yourselves to see what they say. I accept no liability for any damage this causes to your system.

If you do try it, please posts your findings in this thread. If you get a SATA version of the firmware from Hitachi, please also post that to this thread.

- Chris

Chris,

The attached file is a firmware update for your Parallel ATA 7K250 driveand is specifically designed to help reduce the noises generated when theidle time sweep functions are triggered in the drive. This update will notrun on any other drive than those for which the firmware is intended. Inorder to successfully execute this update, you need to meet the followingrequirements:

1) A system with a floppy disk drive.2) A Hitachi GST hard drive with one of the following model numbers: -HDS722540VLAT20 -HDS722580VLAT20 -HDS722512VLAT20 -HDS722512VLAT80 -HDS722516VLAT20 -HDS722516VLAT803) A non-RAID ATA controller.

****Note: If your drive was originally sold to a system manufacturer forintegration into their systems, this update utility may not work. Thisupdate utility is designed to run only on drives sold in the distributionand retail markets. Updates for drives originally sold in pre-builtsystems should be obtained from the system manufacturer.

Once you have met the above requirements, you will need to make a bootablefloppy that contains the Drive Fitness Test Firmware Upgrade Utility. Todo this, please follow these instructions:

1) Detach the attachment from this email to a temporary directory on yoursystem (i.e. your Windows Desktop).2) The file we have sent you is in ZIP format, as there are many firewalland anti-virus programs that may not allow EXE files to be sent directly.You will need to extract the EXE file using an extraction program such asWinZip or WinRAR.3) Double-click the extracted executable file (.exe) to launch the InstallShield Wizard.4) Follow the on-screen instructions, inserting a blank floppy disk whenprompted.

****Warning: Before initiating the update process, be sure you back upyour data to a separate medium (CD, DVD, different Hard Drive, etc...) andverify the backup was successful. If the firmware update is notsuccessful, the data on the drive being updated will be lost.

Insert the disk into the floppy drive and boot the system. If the driveyou wish to update is capable of being updated, you will get a messageasking if you want to update the firmware on the drive. If you choose toUpdate, the process will begin. This may take several minutes to complete.

It is very important NOT to disturb this process until it has completedsuccessfully. Should the process be prematurely terminated, the drive maybe rendered inoperable and the data unrecoverable.

Once the update has been completed, the system bus will be rescanned. Ifthe update was successful and no other drives were detected that may needthe update, you will receive a message indicating so and you will beprompted to exit.

If you encounter any problems during or immediately following the update,please contact technical support at 888.426.5214. We can be reached duringthe hours of 8am to 8pm, Monday through Friday. You can also email us atsupport2_usa@hitachigst.com

In case anyone still needs this. I've created image files from a floppy disk with the firmware (Drive Fitness Test to be exact) installed. Use ImgBurn (http://www.imgburn.com/, ISO extention) or Nero (http://www.nero.com/eng/, NRG extention) to create a bootable CD/DVD, or WinImage (http://www.winimage.com/, IMA extention) to create a bootable floppy disk.